After 16 years in teaching, I have learned that, no matter what else changes in your educational landscape, there is no more important relationship than that between a teacher and their photocopier.
This brooding hunk of metal and plastic holds power over every living, breathing soul in the building. It can gladden your heart by presenting you with a perfectly laid-out booklet, raise your blood pressure to new heights with its insistence that there is still paper trapped in its insides, and destroy your lesson observation by flatly refusing to proceed without toner.
I know there’s talk of not needing a photocopier any more. Of visualisers and worksheet-free lessons being the main thing. But the visualiser refuses to swim into focus for more than half a second, and there’s two maths textbooks to share between 28 children, so who are we kidding?
Codependent relationships
But, as in all codependent relationships, the power balance is not an easy one. There will be days when you are in perfect harmony, where a gentle press of a button will bring forth a pristine offering of warm Sats practice papers.
Then there are the tough times when both sides are angry and uncooperative. And days when the machine holds all the power and you find yourself locked in some kind of coercive control, crouching by its side, screaming: “Hello! Do you copy?” and offering your entire class pack of gluesticks to anyone in the vicinity who knows where to find dial E.
I once worked in a church school with a solo photocopier that was so outlandishly temperamental we resorted to asking the parish priest to come and bless it, in the hope that he might have more luck than Colin, the engineer regularly seen lying under its inky carcass.
But, however much it drives us to distraction, we need our photocopier. So woe betide anyone who tries to come between us.
Photocopier autocracy
Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You know a new leader is about to make your life harder when they immediately bring in a raft of rules and non-negotiables. You know they really mean business when they involve the photocopier.
In this instance it started off lightly, with the headteacher explaining that he wanted a copy of all sheets photocopied to evaluate their usefulness. This fizzled out within about a week, when he no longer had the time or inclination to wade through them.
The next step was to limit our paper. Each teacher was given several packets, with strict instructions that it had to last till Christmas. The office manager was told to guard the key to the stationery cupboard with her life.
As the term wore on, the tension between staff protecting their dwindling reserves rose dramatically, until the early years teachers discovered a huge stash of paper behind the nativity costumes, and a thriving black market saved the day.
Thwarted again, the head finally issued every member of staff with a personal code, to track photocopying activity more closely (and no doubt index-link it to performance management). Luckily, this plan failed when someone discovered the deputy head’s code and we all simply used that instead.
Finally, he gave up. The battle was lost. Photocopier: 1; autocratic leadership: 0.
Jo Brighouse is a pseudonym for a primary teacher in the West Midlands. She tweets @jo_brighouse
